Knight and the Witch 02 - A Summer Bewitchment (10 page)

“I am most sorry for any long delay, Magnus,” she said at once in the old speech—
our speech
—though he chose not to be mollified quite yet.

“Humph! That would be more convincing if you had spent less time gossiping with Ruth.”

“Talking, husband—”

“Still, she almost smiled at me just now instead of screaming, so that is progress and all to the good. Did you learn more from your talk?”

She twisted about in the saddle to look up at him and he, used to her antics while on horseback, gripped her legs firmly with his so she did not fall. His horse, also accustomed to this shifting passenger, whickered and pranced a step or two along the road, to remind her to attend.

Elfrida, not at all disconcerted, laughed at them both. “We spoke of food and midsummer. You were beside us and heard.”

“Even so.”

“Yes.” The brief merriment in her face faded. She turned slightly, looking straight forward between the horse’s ears, and spoke over the beast’s steady canter. “He is very close but well hidden. That is why I asked after food. A local dish may show us where he is. Ruth’s memories are scattered, a few images only. Corncockle flowers and meadowsweet. A pool. Red kites. Barley bread, a little stale. A soft cheese coated in brine.”

That stirred a memory in Magnus and he mulled it while trees and fields flickered past at the corners of his sight. This was good, rising country with lush grass, a land for sheep and well-tended pea and barley crops. Elfrida was right. Silvester was camped close
. If I can just remember the name of the cheese, the place where it is made, I shall know where to search next.

He hoped the parley would give him some new insights, but in truth he had little hope. If this encounter at least confirmed his and Elfrida’s suspicions concerning Silvester, that would be a start.

“Why is Lady Astrid riding with us?”

His wife’s very direct question broke into his welter of thoughts. Magnus tightened his grip on the reins, staring at the straight-backed woman cantering directly in front of them, handling her fiery mount with ease. “She feigns a sudden illness well, does she not? And recovers in a miraculous fashion. But to say truth, I am glad she came with us rather than remaining behind and beguiling my men. As for being a hostage short, Mark has the relic and Lord Richard will want that returned with all its gems.”

“The relic returned but not Tancred? His own brother?”

He sensed her bewildered indignation and agreed with her. “’Tis a grim business, I know, but Richard and Tancred are rivals for Rowena.”

“Yet surely Lord Richard is already surrounded by lands and goods!”

Magnus said nothing. After a moment, Elfrida murmured, “Rowena is very beautiful.”

“So her present captor will not want to relinquish her, whatever the original plan.” Speaking in the old tongue in order to share frankly and plan ahead before they reached Lord Richard’s manor, both of them were careful not to mention Silvester’s name.

“That is what happened, is it not?” said Elfrida quietly. “There is your hasty plan. Rowena’s close kin die suddenly, she becomes an heiress and former secret betrothals look too small. But if she is spirited away to some place where neither Tancred nor the church can find her, she can emerge later as already betrothed, almost married.”

She squeezed his arms. “He should have given her up by now. They, whoever plotted this”—Elfrida nodded to the riding Lady Astrid—“must have expected him to pass her over to them.”

“A risky plan, since they knew what the fellow was like and his liking for young maids. They did not even arrange that he would see her first. Or if they did, they did not mark his excitement.”

Elfrida stiffened and he felt the rage boiling in her, anger as heat. When she spoke it was in a low, cold voice. “Six others taken, also. Six. They did nothing. They promised and cajoled so their people would work, they took trace from the families of the missing maids so it would seem that they cared and still they did nothing.”

“The kidnapper is one of theirs, a nobleman, no doubt a Percival.”

“Tancred, as bad as the rest…”

That, he knew, hurt her. “We do not abandon them,” he said. “I promise you, we shall find these other girls.”

She crossed herself. “Soon,” she agreed, clearly making her wish a prayer.

After that brief exchange the column accelerated and Elfrida had to concentrate on riding. She listened to the earth spitting and hissing beneath the horses’ hooves and sensed the rolling tension in Magnus’s big bay. This was a place of spiteful spirits and secrets, of sweet cicely bursting from rank ditches, of raptors preying out of cloudless blue skies. Was it any wonder the Percivals flourished here?

Gripping the bay’s stiff mane, leaning back against Magnus as he brought his arms ever tighter about her, she allowed the passing country to seep into her.

Silvester knows every brook and tree of this land, as I know mine. He worships the white lady, the sacred Virgin and mother, and gathers corncockle, cicely and meadowsweet in her honor. Purple and white are her colors. He will want to have his maids arrayed in the same shades, perhaps for the coming midsummer revels.

Magnus and I must seek out dyers and flax workers and question them.
Something else nagged at her, something she had known or been told and had forgotten. Even as she tried to remember, the memory slipped away.

There were the jewels Silvester gave to his maidens, too, although Ruth had shaken her head when Elfrida had asked her if she had kept any of his tokens.

She feared I would take the gem. It is precious to her, not only because it is gold, but because of the man who gave it.

Saddened, Elfrida fingered her own bright wedding ring, wishing for a selfish instant that Lady Astrid had never sought out Magnus.

And why did she? To disguise her own failure by involving and then blaming him. If he had recovered Rowena, she would have taken the girl back, and continued her plotting, playing two brothers off each other.

Is Silvester also a relative of hers? Surely he must be.

“Is she his cousin? His mother?” she asked aloud, appalled at the last idea.

“Hola!” Magnus’s shout shattered her gloomy thoughts. “What a place!”

The manor shimmered in the warm late afternoon light like a great tent in a breeze. Magnus counted two towers and twenty banners, two jetties and three floors, a great hall, two kitchens and a bath house.

Plenty of laundresses here
.

“How can this lord want more?” Elfrida whispered. His generous wench did not understand greed.

“What kind of manners will they have?” she went on. “I do not want to shame you.”

“Never that, my heart,” he said easily. He knew it was the snobbish poison of Lady Astrid that inspired his wife’s fears, but part of him was disappointed.
Does she not realize by now that I am never ashamed of her? What does she fear of me, that I will repudiate her because she uses the wrong knife for her meat? And yet, are we not alike in this? I fear ridicule from my looks. She fears ridicule from her class.

He hugged her with his thighs. “Should you make any mistake, I will accept kisses as excuses.”

As he hoped, that made her laugh. A greater joy to him was the greeting given to him and his people by a crusty house steward. Already awaiting them outside the manor steps, the elderly retainer at once informed him that their chamber had been made ready.

“My Lord Richard bids you welcome. You have time to relax, bathe and change in your room before supper.”

“We have a room,” breathed Elfrida. “So rich.”

“We have our solar at home,” he reminded her, but she was right. A private room for a pair of guests was grand indeed. The warrior in him guessed another reason for this bounty too, a hard-headed, practical reason.

The lord wants to question his herald and Lady Astrid in private first. That is what I would do. What I will also do is post my own guards outside our room and in the stables.

Then Elfrida and I shall take a bath, together.

“Excellent! Many thanks!” Magnus replied, smiling broadly as he dismounted.

Elfrida glanced at the bath-tub, then at him, a flicker of longing falling across her face like a beam of light, then she shook her head. “I must speak to Githa. She knows more than her mistress wants her to know about Silvester. I must learn what it is.”

“Githa will be bathing and changing,” Magnus replied. He had his own designs for spending time very pleasantly before supper and catching the desire in Elfrida’s face, he intended to see them all through.
In any hunt there is always waiting and this is our lingering time. I know, Elfrida, more than you, what will take that strain from your eyes and the frown from your forehead. It will also ease your heart and mine.
He rippled his fingers. “Come, wife. Our bath will soon be ready.”

Still tense, she sped away, across the chamber and leaned over the wooden half-barrel. “Only if the water is invisible.”

“They must heat it and bring it. While they do we will sample the bed.” Determined to keep her with him, he untied the bed curtains and drew them closed. “The evening will be long and we shall need our wits. We should snatch a nap.”

Whistling, he danced across the wooden floor and gathered her close while she was still chuckling at his caper. Swinging her along with him, he had her back by the bed and bundled through the curtains before she could speak.

“Listen,” he said, blowing a kiss on the back of her neck as she seemed about to protest. “Our bath-water. The first of many ewers, jugs, and buckets.”

If her ears could prick up like a hound’s, they would have, he thought, amused, as she scrambled up on her knees on the bed. Scarcely breathing, her right hand half-raised as if ready to defend, her bright eyes traced the moving shadows beyond the bed curtains.

“Why do they not speak?” she whispered, when a slosh of water confirmed that the servants had begun to fill the tub and were gone for the next bucket-load.

“Nobles do not like their people talking.” He kissed her summer freckles, as many as he could, while she tugged at his belt and tunic, inhaling deeply.

“I stink,” he warned.

“I love how you smell.” Tearing off his tunic, she buried her nose in his armpit for an instant, then kissed down his ribs. “When you bested Oswin, I wanted to do this and more. Salt and leather and my Magnus.” She flicked her tongue across his belly curls, not quite bold enough yet, he guessed, to go lower.

Kneeling with her, he had his own delicious torment by now— whether to let her drag him flat on the bed and continue her warm, teasing kisses, or take charge and be her conqueror.

Since I want to get her pregnant I know what I should do, but she is such an appealing little wench when she is bold.

Still choosing, he dropped into the middle of the soft, spongy mattress, bringing her down with him. At once she stiffened, but only because the door opened again.

“They will know we are here, Magnus,” she hissed.

He kissed the tip of her nose.
Not so bold after all, but still appealing
. “Never fret! No one shall disturb us.”

He heard another bucket of water being tipped into the tub and tingled his thumb down her cheek. “Does it trouble you, sweeting, our being here? Or do you feel it should?”

She said nothing, but when the chamber door closed, she wrapped her arms tightly around his neck and yanked him into her kiss. Delighted, he plunged into her embrace, though planning to do things differently later.

Elfrida dozed. She and Magnus had made love in the way he wanted of late, like a stallion and mare. He was so deep inside her in that way, she was so captive beneath him, that she felt overwhelmed by love.

I am wanton, too, for in the end, when he spun me over on the pillow and came into me from behind, I did not care if the servants were beyond the bed curtains or not. He had me then and I was his and that was all that mattered.

Dizzy with fully quenched desire, replete as Magnus—
my magnificent brute of a husband
—caressed her back and thighs and bottom, she drifted between wakefulness and sleep. He whispered to her, love words in the old speech, and praised her skin and lissome curves and hair.

I am glad
.

But still the beat of her slowing heart had a sadness in it.
I miss his face as we make love.

The thought pierced her, then was gone and she glowed afresh, aware that the bath-water was ready but far too comfortable to move.

I know we must shift soon and face these Percivals, but not yet, thank the Mother, not yet…

While he and Elfrida bathed, the unseen servants had removed his wife’s gown and left her another, a curious thing, to Magnus’s way of thinking.

“Where are its sleeves?” he asked, flinging his towel onto the bed as he stared at the robe draped over the window shutters. By the dim sunlight in the room it looked a faded brown. Missing sleeves and belt it was as shapeless as a monk’s cassock, with a drab, short veil to match.